Ellen Duffy - an incidental flux

'an incidental flux' is the first solo show by Ellen Duffy, Draíocht’s resident artist 2022/2023, commissioned by Draíocht and curated by Sharon Murphy.

Duffy works across sculptural assemblage, expanded painting, mixed media collage and drawing. Her process is playful and seeks the building of dialogue between the objects/materials used in her work. She builds on gestural mark-making and the integration of recurring forms that appear across her artistic practice taken from found forms of her everyday. Using site responsive installations, works on paper and sculpture to build networks that call to the interconnections between the viewer, the space, the work and the artist. Duffy’s process-led engagement is haptically driven by an interest in materiality, form and colour.

For this new body of work, Duffy has adopted and retranslated found and sourced materials during her year long residency at Draíocht to build a new abstract, playful language for a site specific exhibition in Draíocht's Ground Floor Gallery. Duffy calls attention to the potential within these seemingly random materials by pulling them from their everyday contexts. Provisionally assembled the installation draws on the connectivity of things. Essential components, fragments of the wider network are together and lifted up by one another. Forms are constricted, layered, shaped and misshaped, contorted and compressed and ultimately are carriers of expression through form and colour for viewers to interpret for themselves.

Artist Biography:
Ellen Duffy is an award winning visual artist based in Dublin 15. She graduated from TU Dublin in 2019 with a first class honours BA in fine art. She was selected for the RDS visual arts graduate awards for its annual exhibition curated by Janet Mullarney and won the RHA residency award 2020.

2021 shows included: ‘Worlds of their own’, Draíocht, Dublin, curated by Sharon Murphy; ‘Non-Events’, Arcade Belfast, curated by artist curator Kate Murphy; ‘Second Summer’, The Dock, Leitrim curated by Sarah Searson; ‘Parallel [in]Between’ duo show with artist/curator Kate Murphy, Platform, Belfast.

In 2022 Duffy was awarded the Agility Award and Next Generation award by the Arts Council and has received continued support from Fingal County Council Arts Office including the Artists Support Scheme 2021 & 2022. Recent 2022 exhibitions include, ‘In & of Itself: Abstraction in the Age of images’ RHA, Dublin, curated by Patrick Murphy; 'Dublin Is', curated by Rubio Hennigan, Hang Tough at the Teeling Whiskey Distillery, Dublin; ‘You breathe differently down here’ curated by Amanda Coogan, Draíocht, Dublin 15. Duffy has completed residencies with the RHA 2021/2022, Draíocht 2022/2023 and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre 2023 as part of an Arts Council Next Generation Award.